The only bond between the numerous college meetings and the university sports is a single event in each, called a strangers' race, which is open to all comers. The purpose of these races is precisely that of our inter-class meetings--to give all promising athletes practice in competition. As the two prizes in each strangers' race average five pounds and thirty shillings respectively, the races are pretty efficient. Though the "blues" sometimes compete--Cross made his record of 1m. 54-2/5s. for the half mile in one of them--they generally abandon them to the new men of promise. While the president and the "blues" generally are rowing and playing football, the colleges thus automatically develop new material for the team. The climax of the athletic meetings of the autumn term is the freshman sports, held on two days, with a day's interval. The friends of the various contestants make up a far larger audience than one finds at similar sports in America; and a brass band plays while the races are on. The whole thing is decidedly inspiring; and for the first time one is brought face to face with the fact that there are inter-varsity games in store. When the winter term opens, bleak and rainy, the strangers' races bring out more upper classmen. By and by the "blues" themselves appear in sweater, muffler, and blazer, and "paddle" about the track to supple their muscles and regain disused racing strides. At the end of a fortnight I noticed a middle-aged gentleman with whom the prominent athletes conferred before and after each day's work. I soon found that he was Mr. C. N. Jackson, a don of Hertford College, who should always be remembered as the first hurdler to finish in even time. It is he who--save the mark--takes the place of our American trainers. At one of our large American universities about this time, as I afterwards learned, a very different scene was enacting. The trainer and the captain called a mass-meeting and collected a band of Mott Haven champions of the past to exhort the University to struggle free from athletic disgrace. Though the inter-varsity games were nearly four months in the future--instead of six or seven weeks as at Oxford--those ancient athletes aroused such enthusiasm that 268 men undertook the three months of indoor training. To one used to such exhortations, the Oxford indifference was as chilling as the weather we were all training in. Mr. Jackson seemed never to notice me; and how could I address him when he had not even asked me to save the university from disgrace? I was forced to the unheroic expedient of presenting a card of introduction. To my surprise, I found that he had been carefully watching my work from day to day, but had not felt justified in giving advice until I asked for it.